We departed from the Grand Bahamas Yacht Club on Wednesday at noon, topped up our diesel at Port Lucaya and then set on our merry way towards home. The plan had been to stop for the night at West End and drop anchor, such that we could then leave at dawn the next day for Florida. As we rounded the island of Grand Bahamas, however, there was a rather large thunderstorm brewing over the north end so John and I decided to keep going. We also read that anchoring in the West End didnt have great holding, depending upon where you drop your anchor.

The weather window looked very good although we knew we would have to motor the entire way, with little to no wind, and potentially run up against a squall or two. We had a little wind (10 knots) from the NW to set our main sail when we left Grand Bahamas but this quickly died so we had to take in our main when it was really rattling. Although we hit a counter current upon leaving the Grand Bahamas, this quickly turned in our favour as we heading NW towards Jacksonville, Florida. Despite no sails, and motoring at 16.5 RPMs, our speed only continued to increase over the first 24 hours of the trip, particularly when we finally hit the Gulf Stream. On my watch, we hit a speed (COG) of 10.6 knots and maintained this for several hours ! Unfortunately, John's night watch (until 3AM) was not so pleasant as we hit the outer edge of a squall with the wind from the north, which kicked up the waves in the Gulf Stream. This quickly died down, nevertheless, when the wind died on my following shift - and the Gulf Stream by morning was as smooth as glass......

The boat traffic was rather heavy in the Gulf Stream, but petered out somewhat as we continued to head towards the St John's inlet. Alas, our 10+ knots of speed didnt last into Friday morning, and we gradually dropped down to our average 6.5 knots......Last night proved a little more eventful, after hours of no wind, John again got the brunt of the weather on his watch (9PM-12AM). In the early evening, we could see the darker clouds begin to form and the winds started to pick up (from 2 knots to 15 knots). By 10PM-11PM, the wind was gusting up to 28 knots from the West and there was a massive thunder/lightning storm over the Mantanzas Inlet. (Quote from John, "It was the worst lightning storm I have ever seen in my life. I thought that we may need to get the ditch bag ready, just in case..."). He thoughtfully steered our course further offshore to avoid the lightning. Meanwhile, I attempted to (not very succesfully) sleep in the forward V-berth cabin (the aft cabin is rather noisy with the engine running) although was somewhat oblivious to how much the weather had deteriorated. I was lucky by the time my watch came up at 12AM - the winds finally died to 12 knots (and then dropped to 6 knots or less so we took in the sail later) and the lightning had stopped. We reset our waypoint for the St Johns Inlet and I set up camp in the cockpit for my 5 hour shift. There was a fair amount of boat traffic so I didnt get alot of reading done on the shift - but did have a pleasant conversation with a US war ship at about 4AM, who kindly called me on the VHF to let me know he was changing course and would be cutting across our stern.

I was holding up well until about 4.30-5AM when the lack of sleep really hit me (I had slept about 4 hours the day before) and, before I knew it, I nodded off and fell asleep at the wheel. Luckily, I was dreaming of a ship and woke myself up - but almost 1/2 hour had gone by !! I quickly checked our position and radar but luckily there was nothing really around us and we were largely on course. We finally reached the well marked, lit channel for the St Johns just before 5AM on Friday morning - where John then took over and I fell into one of the deepest sleeps I have ever had. The winds had died down so it was a calm motor through downtown Jacksonville - except we entered the inlet at the opposing tide, which dropped our speed to 4-4.5 knots. (We had checked the tide tables before as the Ortega River gets very shallow and knew we were coming in a low tide but this would change in our favour around 10AM - yet it didnt but started to change closer to 11AM). The tide meant John had to take us off auto pilot several times to manouvre us through the various bridges via downtown - and it also meant we helped dredge the channel a bit on our approach to the Ortega River Bridge (depth meter at less than 3 feet).

But we are happy to be back at Sadler Point Marina/Boatyard on the Ortega River - the place where all our sailing adventures started (January 2009) and it is particularly great to see all the familiar faces. The next 2 weeks are dedicated to John's captain license and boat projects and then we haul the boat for several weeks for our centerboard repair and to get rid of all the little critters that joined a party on the bottom of our boat.

A side note: Grand Bahamas Yacht Club is one of the better marinas we visited in the Caribbean (great service and facilities) and I was particularly happy when they gave us our third night of docking free (and only charged us one night of electricity).